Agencies train on crisis communication

A room full of professional communicators spend two days learning the ins and outs of effective crisis communication this week.

On Wednesday and Thursday, public information officials from agencies all over Montana met in Helena for a training funded by the Department of Homeland Security and organized through Montana’s Disaster and Emergency Services division.

Trainers from Media Survival Group created the curriculum and picked scenarios for the training earlier this year. For the last scenario, they chose an Ebola outbreak as their scenario, not knowing that would become a real world event.

Karen Terrill of Media Survival Group was the lead trainer and said the program helps public information officials think about and rehearse how to effectively disseminate information during a crisis situation.

“The primary goal is keeping the public safe with information,” she said.

The group included representatives from law enforcement, public health, military, fire departments, Bureau of Land Management, the governor’s office and others.

Terrill has experience as a broadcast journalist and a public information official. She said the training allows officials to get to know each other before a crisis hits and also to work out kinks in the process so they don’t have to scramble when something happens.

“If you don’t know each other before something happens, you can get tangled up in those conflicts,” she said. “You don’t wait until the event happens and then make your plan.”

After Sept. 11, 2001, the president issued a directive that agencies better share information with each other and the public in emergencies. The attacks in New York, the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania exposed weaknesses in the information sharing system.

Terrill said emergency responders have excellent training and drills for how to respond to emergencies, but the level of training wasn’t the same for public information officials.

“We can do better,” she said.

The group broke into teams that came up with news releases, social media posts, news briefings and other tactics to disseminate information for a simulated crisis and to also share information they got from the public with responders in the field.

Maj. Cody Smith, spokesman for the 120th Airlift Wing in Great Falls, attended the training.

He said he’d never attended a training that brought together public information officials from various agencies to share best practices and work through their plans and processes.

“Everybody here has their area of expertise,” he said. “What we’re working for here is what happens when something happens that crosses areas of expertise and jurisdiction. It’s a group of very smart, educated people that have to work together as a group.”